ON THIS DAY
FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE
NOVEMBER 28, 1942 HOuSEWIvES in the Midlands are being invited to take their Christmas pudding mixtures to British restaurants to be boiled, thus saving time and fuel. It takes eight to 12 hours to boil a pudding. The charge is 4d a basin, and the basins must be labelled.
NOVEMBER 28, 1975 ROSS McWHIRTER, creator of the Guinness Book Of Records, was shot dead last night at the front door of his home. His killers were believed to be two members of an IRA death squad. The murder came only three weeks after Mr McWhirter organised a reward of £50,000 for information leading to the capture of terrorists.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
ED HARRIS, 69. The American actor (pictured), dubbed ‘the thinking woman’s sex symbol’, starred in Apollo 13, The Truman Show and The Hours. He said his first experience on stage was ‘a transcendent thing, like levitating or something, outside of myself. I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to get back there’.
ARMAnDO IAnnuCCI, 56. The Glasgowborn satirist co-created Alan Partridge and directed 2017 film The Death Of Stalin. As a child, he dreamed of being a priest. He also created sitcom The Thick of It, which featured copious bad language. Iannucci said: ‘I am not naturally a swearer’ and had to hire an ‘expletive adviser’.
BORN ON THIS DAY
AnnA nICOLE SMITH (1967-2007). The Texan Playboy Playmate of the Year was 26 when she married 89-year-old billionaire J. Howard Marshall. He died 14 months later and Smith (pictured) spent the rest of her life — before her death aged 39 — fighting Marshall’s family over his fortune. In 2011, Anna nicole, an opera about her life, premiered at London’s Royal Opera House.
FRIEDRICH EnGELS (1820-1895). The German philosopher, who co-wrote the Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx, was the son of a family of industrialists and apprenticed to a family mill in Salford by his father to combat his rebellious nature. While there, Engels gave up ‘the dinner-parties and champagne of the middle classes’ and took up the fight for the workers.
ON NOVEMBER 28…
IN 1967, British graduate student Jocelyn Bell Burnell and her supervisor at Cambridge university, Antony Hewish, detected the first radio pulsars (a type of neutron star), for which her male collaborators received the physics nobel prize in 1974.
IN 1968, English children’s author Enid Blyton died, aged 71.
In 1974, John Lennon made his last ever concert appearance when he joined Elton John on stage at Madison Square Garden.
WORD WIZARDRY
GUESS THE DEFINITION: Muliebrious (1882)
A) Deceitful B) Effeminate C) Relating to a donkey (Answer below)
PHRASE EXPLAINED
Cross that bridge when you come to it — meaning to solve that problem when it arises; it first appeared in Longfellow’s 1851 work The Golden Legend.
QUOTE FOR TODAY
I sINg to the realists; people who accept it like it is
Aretha Franklin, American singer-songwriter (1942-2018)
JOKE OF THE DAY
WHAT sounds like a sneeze and is made of paper? A tissue. gUEss THE DEFINITION answer B